The cloud model is of increasing importance to next generation network-centric applications in that it enables dynamic, scalable, resilient and cost effective solutions to be deployed and managed. The resources within a cloud can be owned or from a utility resource provider or indeed a combination of both. We have been developing and managing a large multi-provider cloud in field deployment for broadcasting applications with an active user community for several years that uses owned resources and resources bought from commercial providers. With the availability of large-scale resources from the increasing number of utility providers, mechanisms are required to enable resources to be added to and removed from clouds in an automated and application-centric way. We use a resource commodity market approach to managing resources within our cloud that is used to define which resources should be used and for how long they should be used and that monitors the performance of resources in an attempt to optimise cloud costs. This model is application centric because how the cost of a resource is calculated is specified by the application. Our cloud interface approach has some similarity with existing inter cloud work however it is distinct in that providers remain unaware of and uncooperative with each other: they form a marketplace through which users can exploit price variation to maximise their profit for their current workload.

The cloud model is increasingly popular as a means of creating dynamic, flexible and cost effective network-centric application infrastructures. The model separates the applications, or application cloud, from the resources, or resource cloud, upon which the applications will be hosted. There are an increasing number of utility resource providers that aim to provide cloud infrastructure on demand to users and libraries that aim to manage owned infrastructure as a resource cloud. There is, unfortunately, no common API for cloud resources and it is unlikely that one will emerge soon given the immaturity of the area and the competing commercial interests in the domain. In this paper, we outline our commodity and application-centric approach to resource management, and describe our integration framework for cloud application management-illustrating its use in a field deployed application and a particular dynamic component within that application.

Unreliability is a characteristic feature of Web and grid based computation: a call to a Web or grid site may or may not succeed. An orchestration manager aims to control Web or grid behaviour by constructing dynamic threads which acquire and utilise appropriate resources. For example, in an orchestration, a site may be called and may fail to respond after a period of time. Subsequently, the site may be recalled, or an alternative site may be utilised. In this paper approaches to estimating the reliability and cost of complex orchestrations are proposed. It is assumed that information about site reliability can be accessed from empirically acquired information.

One of the challenges for the grid community is to develop services to support both shared computation and shared information. As a part of this development, it is necessary to convert laboratories to pervasive computing environments (smart laboratories) where data generated in the laboratories can be captured and published automatically; where information generated can be combined and compound with other laboratories’ data on demand. In this paper, we describe one such initiative to capture and consume the data generated by the nucleotide sequencer in the grid enabled automated analysis system called GeneGrid developed at the Belfast e-Science Centre.

GeneGrid is a collaborative industrial R&D project initiated by the Belfast e-Science Centre, under the UK e-Science Programme, with commercial partners involved in the research and development of antibodies and drugs. GeneGrid provides a platform for scientists, especially biologists, to access their collective skills, experiences and results in a secure, reliable and scalable manner through the creation of a 'Virtual Bioinformatics Laboratory'. It enables the seamless integration of a myriad of heterogeneous applications and datasets that span multiple administrative domains and locations across the globe, and present these to the scientist through a simple user friendly interface. This paper presents how the grid services of GeneGrid are involved in the integration of bioinformatics applications as well as in the creation and execution of in silico experiments. A real use case scenario is also presented, involving the identification of novel members belonging to a protein family, for demonstrating the capabilities of GeneGrid.

This paper presents a domain configuration grid service which provides a service configuration and lifecycle management mechanism for a grid infrastructure employing a service oriented architecture (SOA). A SOA grid infrastructure is typically composed of numerous domains, which in turn are typically composed of numerous services. A grid usually exists to achieve a set of pre-defined goals; therefore services must interoperate possibly across independent domains to meet the objective(s). This paper details a discussion of the reasons why service configuration and lifecycle management is required in a loosely coupled distributed system, in particular a grid SOA system named Gridcast. In order to avail of the benefits offered by a loosely coupled system it is important to maintain an efficient grid, this paper presents a number of service configuration and lifecycle management strategies which aim to achieve that goal

In this paper the design of a CASE tool for measuring the complexity of object oriented software systems is described. Use of the tool within the software testing and release sub-process is outlined. The paper argues that (i) for metrics to be properly integrated into a software process requires tool support; (ii) tools must support heterogeneous systems often involving multiple programming languages to be useful in commercial development environments and (iii) given the immaturity of current complexity metrics, tools must be adaptable so that new metrics can readily be incorporated to best support the software process. Using an object oriented programming language meta-model in its database schema, the tool provides a flexible architecture facilitating support for new object oriented programming languages and metrics with relative ease. We believe these are essential requirements for measurement tools used in environments of constantly improving software processes indicative of high maturity organisations.

The issues of re-engineering and reverse engineering have become important ones in the computing industry. A legacy system that has evolved has usually been worked on by many different programmers and reflects the different programming styles as practised by those programmers. We address the re-engineering of a large system, the TAMPR automatic program transformation system, written in pure Lisp. TAMPR is an essential tool in ongoing research on potential applications of automated program transformation. The program implementing the TAMPR system is better designed and more consistently coded than most legacy systems. Why, then, is reverse engineering being attempted for this system, given that it suffers few of the problems of more traditionally implemented legacy systems? We are interested in studying the problem of abstraction in reverse engineering, and the TAMPR system, with its systematic design and coding, provides a good starting point for studying approaches to automated abstraction to an object-oriented form. In addition, while the system in its present form meets the current needs of its users, there are problems with providing widely available, efficient implementations of the system. The target language for this experiment in reverse engineering is Java. Java was chosen because of its widespread availability, claimed portability and its integration with components for the construction of graphical user interfaces. We use TAMPR transformations to reverse engineer the TAMPR program itself.

The automated application of program transformations is used to derive, from abstract functional specifications of numerical mathematical algorithms, highly efficient imperative implementations tailored for execution on sequential, vector and array processors. Emphasis is placed on transformations which tailor implementations to use special programming techniques optimized for sparse matrices. We demonstrate that derived implementations attain superior execution performance than manual implementations for two significant algorithms.

Abstract One can have all the advantages of functional programming – correctness, clarity, simplicity, and flexibility – without any sacrifice in performance, even for a scientifically significant computation on a supercomputer. Therefore, why use Fortran? We demonstrate parity – equality of speed and storage use – between a program generated automatically from a functional specification and a program written by hand in the procedural style. To our knowledge, this demonstration of parity is the first for a program that solves a scientifically significant problem – quasi-linear hyperbolic partial differential equations – on a scientifically interesting supercomputer – the CRAY X-MP. We use pure Lisp, including higher-order functions, to express the functional specification for the PDE solver. We designed this specification for maximal clarity and flexibility, rather than for efficiency. Nevertheless, we obtain a highly efficient program to solve the PDEs: automated program transformations put back the missing efficiency as they produce an executable Fortran program from the specification. The generated Fortran program vectorizes on the CRAY X-MP and runs about 4% faster than a handwritten Fortran program for the same problem. We describe the problem and the specification, and some of the problem-domain-specific and hardware-specific transformations that we use to obtain the high-efficiency program.